For a growing number of people, the question of which Herman Miller ergonomic chair to sit in has become irrelevant. Instead, they’re shopping for a good pair of supportive shoes and a comfortable fatigue mat. That’s because instead of sitting at their desk all day, they’re standing up. Driven by a growing body of research highlighting the dangers of our sedentary lifestyles (and sitting in particular), standing desks have become something of a trend in the past few years.
Standing desks got their big break in 2005 when the New York Times published an article about Dr. James Levine at the Mayo clinic. He authored a study showing that leaner people tend to exhibit more nonexercise activity (things like pacing, fidgeting, and otherwise moving around). In the story, they mention that he had replaced his former desk with a treadmill. His treadmill setup goes a quite a bit beyond the basic stand-up desk, but that story seemed to be a catalyst that got the world of office workers talking about standing desks of all sorts, moving or not.
The story highlighted something that has since been confirmed by subsequent studies: Sitting is bad for you. CNN recently reported on a new meta-analysis that looked at 47 studies of sedentary time and its effects on our health. Part of their conclusion? Even for those who exercise regularly, the amount of “sitting we typically do in a day still outweighs the benefit we get from exercise”. Citing data provided by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, physicians at the Mayo clinic state the case simply:
“…Americans’ sedentary lifestyle shortens their life expectancy. If Americans would cut their sitting time in half, their life expectancy would increase by roughly:
- 2 years (by reducing sitting to less than 3 hours a day)
- 1.4 years (by reducing TV time to less than 2 hours a day)”
The World Health Organization considers physical inactivity to be “the fourth leading risk factor for global mortality causing an estimated 3.2 million deaths globally.”
Of course, a major cause of all that sitting is that so many of us do our jobs that way. We are tied to our computers, and our computers are sitting on waist high desks like the typewriters they replaced. “Sitting at the computer” is so natural that the phrase is a cliche.
As the medical community has increased its efforts to get the public to stand up and move around, we’ve finally started to rethink that arrangement. We may not be able to free ourselves from the computers (yet), but maybe we don’t need to sit in front of them so much. Standing desks are a logical conclusion.
And they do seem to help. The primary benefit seems to be that standing at our desks not only reduces time spent sitting, it increases the amount of corollary movements we make. Those movements make up much of that nonexercise activity Dr. Levine identified ten years ago – activity that burns calories throughout the day and helps keep our systems in good working order. Standing isn’t a cure all per se, but standing desks are an easy way to encourage the type of activities that are.
It’s worth noting, as they do in the Smithsonian Magazine article linked above, that if you do commit to standing more, you shouldn’t over do it. Go for a mix of sitting and standing, because too much standing can cause knee, foot, and back problems. The real conclusion here may be that may be that medical researchers have not yet found any downsides to spending all day at the beach.
